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New Plymouth-Auckland
Today was another travelling day with little to report, from New Plymouth to a B&B near Auckland airport so we're well placed for tomorrow's flight.
We spent last night at Northgate Motor Lodge in New Plymouth. The room had proper air conditioning, which was refreshing. It was a bit of a hike from the centre of town, but this was probably for the best as the nightlife seemed a bit rowdy. If I have reason to be in New Plymouth in future I'd happily stay there again.
As an experiment I opted to include a GPS in the car hire on North Island. We christened it Nanny or Big Bother depending on which voice we had selected.
The supplied Navman is slightly clunky but has some nifty features, but we spent a lot of time swearing at it. Not at the GPS itself, mind you, but inaccuracies in the unit's database. We found some road that it didn't think existed ("Find the nearest road") - not a back road either, this was a section of State Highway 1 by Taupo. It doesn't have good accuracy of numbering on rural roads, which is a function of distance from the beginning of the road; it was maybe half a km out in getting us to the car park at Hobbiton. In New Plymouth it directed us to a petrol station which just didn't exist, and there was no sign of a station having ever existed there. Most annoyingly some of the "you are speeding" warnings it raises - with a chiding chiming noise - were spurious; sometimes inaccurate positioning, sometimes claiming there were limits which just didn't match the signs. Garbage in, garbage out?
We drove 1868 kms, or 1160 miles, on North Island.
Today was another travelling day with little to report, from New Plymouth to a B&B near Auckland airport so we're well placed for tomorrow's flight.
We spent last night at Northgate Motor Lodge in New Plymouth. The room had proper air conditioning, which was refreshing. It was a bit of a hike from the centre of town, but this was probably for the best as the nightlife seemed a bit rowdy. If I have reason to be in New Plymouth in future I'd happily stay there again.
As an experiment I opted to include a GPS in the car hire on North Island. We christened it Nanny or Big Bother depending on which voice we had selected.
The supplied Navman is slightly clunky but has some nifty features, but we spent a lot of time swearing at it. Not at the GPS itself, mind you, but inaccuracies in the unit's database. We found some road that it didn't think existed ("Find the nearest road") - not a back road either, this was a section of State Highway 1 by Taupo. It doesn't have good accuracy of numbering on rural roads, which is a function of distance from the beginning of the road; it was maybe half a km out in getting us to the car park at Hobbiton. In New Plymouth it directed us to a petrol station which just didn't exist, and there was no sign of a station having ever existed there. Most annoyingly some of the "you are speeding" warnings it raises - with a chiding chiming noise - were spurious; sometimes inaccurate positioning, sometimes claiming there were limits which just didn't match the signs. Garbage in, garbage out?
We drove 1868 kms, or 1160 miles, on North Island.
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